Monday, November 2, 1998

Historic Biak na Bato is Heading for Ecological Disaster

by VINIA M. DATINGUINOO
BIAK-NA-BATO, BULACAN

A HUNDRED years ago, Katipuneros fighting Spanish colonial rule hiked in these hills at the foot of the grand Sierra Madre, they drank from its springs and took shelter in its caves.
Today as the Philippines celebrates the centennial year of its revolution against Spain, a limestone quarry company is relentlessly mining here, in what is supposed to be a national park. Six other firms are seeking quarrying permits from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), while one small-scale operation is already in force.
Environmentalists fear that these operations would wreak havoc on the fragile ecosystem of historic Biak-na-Bato, whose geological base forms part of the Angat watershed that supplies the water requirements of Metro Manila.
Biak-na-Bato’s natural springs serve the needs of local communities surrounding the park. Most of its over 100 caves remain unexplored and continue to evolve naturally. It is also a bird sanctuary, with some 30 bird species so far identified as endemic to the area.
But if Lourdes Pascual has her way, the Rosemoor Mining and Development Corporation that she owns would continue quarrying in a 330-hectare site at the heart of Biak-na-Bato.
The feisty 69-year-old is also boring a huge hole into the limestone cliffs of Mt. Mabio, which is part of the park and where she is building a religious shrine. Pascual’s excitement about her project is palpable, matched only by her single-mindedness to go on with both quarry and shrine despite the protests of environmentalists and the questionable legality of her quarry license. Even now, she imagines the throngs that would be flocking to her Marian temple in a few months.
By the time Pascual’s shrine welcomes its first visitor, say environment experts, Biak-na-Bato’s beauty and balance would have already been damaged by the massive extraction of marbleized limestone; its water supply would be severely diminished, if still flowing at all. The impact would not only be aesthetic: Experts say that the communities surrounding the park would suffer as well.
An “indicator spot” is sitio Cogonan, a small community that used to get its water directly off the north face of Mt. Mabio where Rosemoor is quarrying. Today Cogonan folk are buying their water by the barrel, as the sitio’s springs have begun to dry up.
The blastings at Mt. Mabio are also causing the collapse of naturally created seeps in the mountain. This means that less water is stored in the watershed that the mountain forms with two neighboring peaks.
“What is happening to Cogonan is an indicator of what will happen to the even bigger communities below Mt. Mabio,” says a geologist of the Miriam PEACE, the NGO that leads conservation efforts for Biak-na-Bato. “In only 10 years this is going to be a place I wouldn’t want to live,” he says. “There will be no more water and without water, there’s no life.”
But environment and local officials have been slow to act, even if they insist that Rosemoor’s license has long expired and its operations therefore illegal.
The Protected Areas and Wildlife Bureau (PAWB) wants Rosemoor’s entire quarry area recovered and included in the declaration of the national park as a protected area, but it seems to be dragging its feet about the issue.
Nongovernmental groups are getting impatient and hope that Biak-na-Bato’s place in the country’s so-called Centennial Freedom Trail will buoy government’s position against the continued quarrying.
But Pascual is holding on steadfast to a two-year old decision by a local court, overturning an earlier cancellation by the DENR of the quarry license and giving her unhampered quarrying rights for 22 more years. The DENR has appealed the decision.
“I will not be stopped,” Pascual says. “They cannot trespass on what is mine.” On her birthday in January, she will lead the ribbon-cutting rites at her future shrine. The Bulacan governor will be guest of honor, and she is awaiting President Joseph Estrada’s nod to a similar invitation.
If Pascual is allowed to continue, it is likely that more firms will soon be quarrying in the park as well. Six other applicants are wooing the DENR’s Mines and Geo-Sciences Bureau to quarry large-scale at Biak-na-Bato. A permit for small-scale operations is already in force. Rosemoor itself filed a new application, this one covering an even bigger 1,550 hectares.
One applicant, Conrado Torres, wants six hectares in an environmentally critical spot, right behind Bahay Paniki, the biggest cave in the park. That cave was once home to millions of bats before people learned to eat them and before quarry operators scared them out of their home.
If Torres’s application is granted, the blasting from his quarry operations can cause Bahay Paniki to collapse, trapping tourists who may be taking a dip or picnicking in the cave.
“I will quit if Torres is given what he wants,” says the Miriam PEACE geologist. “I don’t want to be here when these people die.”
Environmentalists insist that the park can be saved only if it is declared a protected area, which means that mining and quarrying activities would be prohibited here.
“It’s not yet too late but all the quarrying has to be stopped now,” says Cristina Juan who leads the conservation efforts of Miriam PEACE.
Biak-na-Bato is at the edge of Bulacan and is about a two-hour drive from Metro Manila. It was here where Katipuneros pushed away from Cavite by Spanish forces took refuge in the woods and the caves. It was in one of these caves where the Pact of Biak-na-Bato was signed in December 1897, when the Aguinaldo government officially ended the Katipunan’s armed struggle in exchange for P800,000 to be paid in three tranches by the Spanish government.
Although historians may say that any reverence is misplaced—the Pact is, after all, also described as “nothing more than a business deal”—Biak-na-Bato deserves a place in the nation’s history just the same.
“If we cannot protect Biak-na-Bato,” asks environmental lawyer Ron Gutierrez, “what more those obscure areas?”
“You’d think that with this year’s celebration of the Centennial, the government will move faster to stop the park’s ruin,” says Gutierrez, whose Tanggol Kalikasan assists the Miriam PEACE in its park conservation efforts. “But government misses even that point,” he complains.
“May issue kasi diyan,” explains PAWB’s Tess Blastique, who oversees dragging efforts to have the park declared a protected area. That issue is Rosemoor’s legal claim at the park. “We are still seeking clarification from the (DENR’s) Legal (Office).”
The declaration cannot be made yet, even for the rest of the park excluding Rosemoor’s claim. “It would be inappropriate to have quarrying activities at the core of a protected area,” says Blastique.
The PAWB fears being cited for contempt of court if it takes away Rosemoor’s license and includes the quarry as part of the protected area.
Lawyer Gutierrez thinks such reasoning is unsound. Whatever pending case, he says, does not exempt the DENR from fulfilling its mandate.
As it is, the DENR has already lost two rounds to Rosemoor, both seemingly by default. The agency botched its own case before the Court of Appeals, and it failed to cancel Rosemoor’s license after the firm violated laws on environmental clearance.
Biak-na-Bato was much bigger in 1937, when President Manuel Quezon proclaimed the 2,117 hectares a national park, citing the area’s historical significance. President Ferdinand Marcos, in 1982 excluded 330 hectares from Quezon’s proclamation and awarded these to Pascual’s Rosemoor Mining and Development Corporation, whom he had earlier allowed to prospect in the area. Rosemoor’s license was issued in August 1982, set to expire in August 1987.
Before the license could expire, President Corazon Aquino in 1986 revoked Marcos’s declaration and reverted the 330 hectares to its former status as part of the national park. The DENR then cancelled Rosemoor’s license. Rosemoor promptly sued the DENR in a Quezon City court.
Meanwhile, President Aquino in 1989 issued her own proclamation dividing Biak-na-Bato into four areas: a much smaller national park, covering only 660 hectares, a mineral reservation (952 has.), watershed area (938 has.), and forest reserve (419 has.).
In September 1996, the Quezon City court decided in favor of Rosemoor. The judge scolded the DENR for violating the mining firm’s property rights, and declared its license to have a life of 25 years, less the three years that had been used up before the cancellation. (The quarry license cancelled by Aquino’s DENR had a term of only five years.)
The DENR, through the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) appealed the decision. It failed, however, to submit on time the required brief for its appeal.
“Patapon na ang kaso (There’s no way the case is going to be won),” says a DENR lawyer. The DENR is “looking for other avenues” by which to have Rosemoor’s license cancelled, the lawyer says.
The appeal was the first round.
Then in May 1998, local DENR officials reported that Rosemoor did not have an environmental clearance for a 3.6-kilometer access road it had built three years earlier. The access road snakes through the watershed area and clearly required an Environmental Compliance Certificate (ECC).
A notice of violation was given Rosemoor, which owner Pascual promptly answered. Pascual maintained that no ECC was needed as the access road traversed only private properties.
For Tanggol’s Gutierrez, such violation was enough ground to have Rosemoor’s license taken away.
The DENR thinks otherwise, and says a single violation of ECC rules cannot result to an automatic cancellation of a license. Its Environmental Management Bureau (EMB) would have to study the violation and consider the appropriate fine or penalty.
Gutierrez thinks the DENR has not worked hard enough. If it is true, he hurls the challenge, that Rosemoor’s case is “tying down their hands, like they say, they should do everything to bring the case to an end.”
In defense, a DENR lawyer says she cannot agree that the agency is working “slower than normal. This is a very complex issue.” The lawyer doesn’t want to be named, while the issues are still being sorted out.
One way to simplify it, she says, is for the Mines and Geo-Sciences Bureau to deny Rosemoor’s new application for an MPSA (Mines Production Sharing Agreement).
The 1986 Constitution required all existing mining permits to be converted to MPSAs. The 1997 Memorandum Order detailing conversion guidelines is referred to as “a cleansing order,” as it was expected to cause the exclusion of quarry permits that are no longer desirable.
Rosemoor’s application is not yet a “vested right,” the lawyer argues, and turning it down would harmonize well with the declaration for a protected area.
Meanwhile, unless the legal issues are resolved, Biak-na-Bato remains in a dangerous limbo.